Why Britain turns a blind eye to torture

Friday 19 February 2010 11:06 BST

Helpless: guards in Guantánamo Bay in 2002 escort a detainee to interrogation

The torture debate is once again raising the ugliest of heads. Following the revelations of MI5's knowledge of torture in the Binyam Mohamed case, ministers have been hot in denial of any collusion in torture with the US or other allies.

Jonathan Evans, head of MI5, told us that Master of the Rolls Lord Neuberger's assessment of the culture of suppression in MI5 was "the opposite of the truth". That constitutes an extraordinary attack on our second-most-senior judge by the head of MI5. At the same time, Alan Johnson and David Miliband joined forces to proclaim that the allegation that our security forces collude in torture is "disgraceful, and untrue".

Not everybody is convinced. Lord Goldsmith has called for a public inquiry, and so has the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights. I am particularly unconvinced, because I was sacked as British Ambassador to Uzbekistan more than five years ago for pointing out our complicity in torture.

That story is going to be told in a David Hare dramatisation of my memoir, Murder in Samarkand, tomorrow on Radio 4. More than five years on, the story remains depressingly topical, and a reflection of a shameful, sordid part of our history to which ministers will still not admit.

I have seen how the system works. To the best of my knowledge, neither MI5 nor MI6 officers personally participated in torture.

The vast bulk of our torture material in recent years has come to us through the CIA. The basic tenet of the UK/US intelligence-sharing agreement is that all intelligence is shared.

So when you hear of a prisoner being waterboarded or otherwise tortured by the CIA or their proxies anywhere in the world, the UK ought certainly to have received any intelligence report that resulted from that torture — just as we received "intelligence" from the torture of Binyam Mohamed.

This is how it worked in Tashkent.

I did not have an MI6 station in my embassy because MI6's health and safety people considered the country too dangerous (sorry, James Bond fans). But the Uzbek security services, perhaps the most brutal in the world, were considered "friendly". They passed on intelligence material from "detainee interrogations" to the CIA. The CIA issued intelligence reports from this material, which they copied to MI6. MI6 released these reports around Whitehall to senior officials and ministers, and at the same time copied them to me in Tashkent.

So material which had originated in the Uzbek security service torture chambers a few miles away, and passed through the US Embassy just down the road, eventually got to me via Washington and London.

The key point — and one I cannot stress too much — is that the vast majority of this material was absolute rubbish. The Uzbek government was eager to convince the US it was fighting a massive Islamic militant threat, so that the US government would continue to give large subsidies to this appalling dictatorship, and particularly to its security services.

The Uzbek government therefore rounded up en masse dissidents, the religious and those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and tortured them into admitting membership of al Qaeda or other allied terror organisations, and into denouncing long lists of other "terrorists".

The tortured were given the lists to sign up to, exactly as done by Stalin's secret police, the direct institutional ancestor of the Uzbek security service.

The mundane truth is that torture in the "War on Terror" does not bring Hollywood-style information about ticking bombs in shopping malls.

It brings piles of rubbish that clog up our intelligence analysis. Torture gives not the truth but what the torturer wants to hear to make the torture stop. And given the destinations on the extraordinary rendition circuit — like Egypt, Morocco, Afghanistan, Syria and Uzbekistan — the relationship between the torturers and the truth was often very distant indeed.

I can swear to you that none of the intelligence I saw from detainees in Uzbekistan was useful. Much of it was palpably untrue, such as referring to terror training camps in places where we knew they physically did not exist.

I was called back to London on 7 March 2003 and told directly that it was not illegal to obtain intelligence from torture and indeed it was policy to do so. Two months ago I obtained the minutes of that meeting, though redacted, under the Freedom of Information Act. There was a separate minute from Jack Straw's private secretary recording Straw's approval of what I had been told.

There was an additional refinement. The intelligence report as issued to me and to ministers did not give you the name of the detainee who was interrogated. This was so you could not prove a specific individual had been tortured to give that information. It was a deliberate double blind to enable ministers to say that they had never knowingly seen intelligence obtained by torture.

I should say for the sake of complete honesty that I did not understand at the time that I had stumbled on the extraordinary rendition programme while I was in Tashkent. I knew the CIA were flying in and handing over prisoners. I knew the CIA people who did it. But I wrongly assumed at the time that the prisoners were all Uzbeks.

But then when I raised these issues first with the Foreign Office in 2002 there was so much we did not know. Most of us did not know the phrase "extraordinary rendition". We had not yet seen the photos of Abu Ghraib. We did not know about waterboarding.

It is hard to realise now, but when I was dismissed in 2004 and first blew the whistle that we were routinely complicit with torture, large sections of the media and public did not believe me. They simply could not imagine that Britain would do such a thing.

Now I never meet anybody who disbelieves me. We desperately need that public inquiry.

David Hare's play Murder in Samarkand, starring David Tennant as Craig Murray, is broadcast on Radio 4 tomorrow at 2.30pm.